September also produced a lot of great fishing. Actually it is one of my favorite times of the year to fish. The fall generally produces good numbers of fish and gives you a great chance of catching a monster of any species. This happens because fish usually go on a big food binge before the winter months. They usually start their food bender in mid September until ice on. These cold weather months have contributed to some of my best fishing days, but this time of year can be a pain in the butt to fish because of the cold weather. You have to dress like your heading out ice fishing in order to make it all day.
October has been bitter sweet. Its always the month that I make the transition from fishing to hunting but this year I spent the first half of the month on a reserve (Kasabonki) helping my dad fly out moose hunters. We got to Kas on the Sept 15th and left there on Oct 11th. Just before we left I reset my trail cams and when I came back I was a little disappointed to find that there was very little that had moved past my cameras. Prior to leaving I was averaging around 1400 pics a month between two cameras but the whole month I was gone I only had a total of 200 pics between the two... Not what I was expecting at all. Honestly I was shattered... I have spent a lot of time putting up stands, cutting trails, and scouting and to come up with hardly anything on the cameras so close to season was depressing to say the least (I all most pulled my cameras from the two areas altogether).
The next week was just as frustrating. Byron, Kari, Tinker, and I guided a couple of moose hunters out at Krooked Lake and came up short. Over the 6 days that we spent out there we only saw two cows. The weather wasn't in our favor and it seemed like wherever we went we were always a step behind what we were looking for. There were fresh tracks on every section so shoreline that we touched but there was never anything standing in the tracks. On the last day Byron and one of the guys we were guiding went for a walk through the woods and when they came back a bull had walked between where they had parked the boat and the tree line. It was enough to make me want to pull my hair out, but it's a part of hunting. When we lose as hunters its always a tough pill to swallow (getting outsmarted by an animal with a smaller brain capacity never goes well).
When we got back from the hunt I was ready to get back in the boat and forget hunting for the rest of the year, but yesterday afternoon I decided to head out to the tree stand and check the trail cams one more time. I got out to the stand around 3:00pm and sat there until dark. At about 5:45 I saw something that looked like a doe about 300 yards away. I thought she spotted me because she wasn't moving at all. After 5min of her not moving I pulled up my scope and saw that I had been looking at a brown shrub. It's sad to say that the shrub was the most exciting part of my trip out to the stand. As I was leaving pulled the camera card out of my camera and shut my camera off. When I got home I plugged my camera card into the computer and saw that a great buck had been in the area every day this week (what was kind of depressing was that it had been standing in front of my camera an hour before I got out there). Last night I could hardly sleep. I got up this morning at 5:30am and headed out to my ground blind at daybreak. The whole morning I froze my tail off and to make things worse I didn't see a thing. I took a short break at 11:00am, put some more clothes on, and was back in my blind at 12:00pm. The afternoon was almost as slow as the morning. I saw a fox around 2:00 and by 3:00 I had made a little squirrel my friend. I shared my Triscuits with him and in a few hours he was almost eating out of my hand (I have a short attention span). At 5:45pm I was busted. A deer got wind of me and all I could do was listen to it run of and snort at me. I didn't even get to see it but it couldn't have been more than 50 yards away when it caught wind of me. What is so amazing to me is how such large animals can be so quiet in the woods. They are just like ghosts that haunt hunters all fall and leave many of us heartbroken at the end of the year.
I'll keep you all posted on how the end of the season turns out. Thanks again for reading.
